Day 4

 

Hello to you all from New Orleans,

Today has been another day of hard work, but very rewarding.  We got an eager start this morning and by noon we had finished clearing the house we started on Tuesday.  Feeling very solid about the accomplishment of leaving two houses ready for re-construction, we set out for our third house.  Our third house is completely different though.  The first two houses had been mostly cleared of belongings either by the homeowner or previous groups.  The house we began working on at 1:00pm today had not been touched since being evacuated two days prior to hurricane Katrina. 

Today has been the most intense emotional experience of the trip, which seems hard to believe after yesterday.  But, after working hard to create a pile on the curb twice the size of our van, the older couple who own the house paid us a visit.  We had all felt some sense of empathy in clearing someone’s belongings from the house, but their gratitude for our work, and their story put a very personal face on the work that we are doing.  We were also able to salvage some things for them from the house that they would have never been able to recover.  They were very grateful, and even in the face and emotion of this situation they were hopeful and positive.  Especially considering a small but significant part of the “new normal” that people are living with here. 

All of the buildings in the flooded areas were searched and tagged, mostly by boat.  So most houses are marked (and some more than once) with a red ’X’ and markings in the four spaces of the ‘X’.  The marking above the ‘X’ is the date it was searched.  To the left there is a designation identifying the search team, and to the right there is sometimes information about the kind of search like “INT” for and interior search or “EX” for an exterior search.  The number below the ‘X’ indicates the number of corpses found in the house.  For example, the house pictured below from the 9^th Ward was searched on 11-7 and there were 2 bodies found inside.  Most of the houses we have seen have a zero at the bottom, but the few that have numbers are a constant reminder of what could have been lost.

 

 

Our experiences today were emotional, but good.  By the end of the day we had cleared our third house and tomorrow we will prepare it for reconstruction.  We were graced by the rare display of sight and sound known as Karen Larsen’s “Rat Dance.”  (we look forward to sharing renditions of it with you all in person)  And we were blessed to be working in the service of our Lord. 

            We miss you, love you, and will see you soon.

Vi & Ed, Karen & Steve, Gail & Marvin, Sherman, Marge & Pastor Jeff.